Review: Andrew Lord, “at sunset, with snow falling, by starlight”

Andrew Lord’s sculptures at Gladstone are contemporary variations on 19th-century ceramic works by Paul Gauguin.CreditCreditDavid Regen/Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

By Ken Johnson

May 14, 2015

At once bracingly ugly and sensuously beautiful, the recent ceramic sculptures by the British artist Andrew Lord look as if they’d been made by a clumsy but aesthetically sensitive giant. Displayed on three white tables are pitchers in the form of human heads with handles, variously shaped vases and constructions resembling maquettes for fountains populated by little nude female figures. Each retains the marks of its vigorous manual formation in the gouging, impressing and squeezing of the clay. They are glazed in Abstract Expressionist style with the colors brushed, poured and drizzled, creating lively marriages of sculptural form and painterly surface.

While they seem to be products of primal, intuitive impulses, the sculptures also have a sophisticated, Postmodernist dimension: All are variations on ceramic works made by Paul Gauguin in the late 1880s and early ’90s, which have been an inspiration for Mr. Lord since the 1970s. In addition, here and there you see irregular lines of gold-leafed glue — repairs of broken parts in the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi.

Mr. Lord created these works in his New Mexico studio with the idea that each set would be glazed to represent different conditions of light. The 13 pieces of “by starlight, Carson mesa (Gauguin)” are mostly dark blue. The 13 in “at sunset” sport bright yellows and tomato-soup reds. In the 15-piece “with snow falling,” pale colors are washed over predominantly off-white glazes, suggesting the haze of wintry precipitation. Contemporary clay sculpture doesn’t get much better than this.